6 Tips for Building Innovation Into Your Company DNAForbesPJ Chan works closely with one of Kotter International's oldest clients, and she's experienced first hand the failure that follows a project-managed approach to innovation.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Only 1 in 5 chief executives believe their companys investment in innovation are paying off.

A very important article from Kotter. However, it is not often that I have an opportunity to disagree with John Kotter but here goes...

#1 of his six tips begins "Innovation only comes by invitation." My take if you are inviting innovation you are not establishing the kind of environment Kotter next describes.

Actually, you only get innovation by creating cultures of innovation. Some do it temporarily with innovative events (designs, agile, kaizen, etc). However sustained innovation only comes with a business designed to be innovative - which also means removing barriers to innovation.

Here is a good question... Is your organization designed to consistently deliver surprisingly great solutions to customers?.... or is it designed to maximize risk avoidance? My experience is that it is the later rather then the former. Which one do you see as innovative?

Despite the astronomical speed of technology changes, most organizations still operate within the traditional top-down authority model.

The article suggest that the future of organizations is "Holacracy" where the organizational power is distributed according to a set of explicit processes and structures designed to achieve the company’s purpose.

In a Holacracy, every role in the organization has an explicit, documented purpose and set of accountabilities, and roles exist separately from the individuals who happen to be filling them at the time.

When hospitals and health systems are starting, growing, or reviving telehealth (or telemedicine or mHealth) programs, one issue eventually comes up – should telehealth be a separate department or should it be integrated into various...

"We seem to have limited understanding of how important it is to design organizations. This may come from our background of inheriting and not being able to design our own families. Most of us feel that we can only do our best in the context of our family organization and have little control on how it evolves."

A great metaphor when thinking about organization design. Most leaders only think of organization design in terms of organization charts - not fundamental and systemic design. That's usually left for "start-ups".

Consider the term "re-design" if you have an established organization you are not stuck with it. You can take a clean sheet and design the perfect organization for your environment - then thing about making it happen.

Too much emphasis on the word social may distract older leaders from comprehending the real power of social business collaboration - faster, better results.

Daanish Kahn offers a great set of five myths about the use of social collaboration tools that needs to be understood by any leader seeking to get results and high levels of engagement.

My favorite is the first one...

Myth 1 – Social Collaboration platforms are not safe and secure.

I remember when a client's CEO (of a very large global company) thought that the entire corporate knowledge could be carried out on a few disks so he prevented connections between product design teams for the sake of security- I thought that didn't say much for the amount of real knowledge in the company. However, it does say something about how some security myths can put competitive handcuffs on your workforce - and your results.

Aligning and engaging people more quickly in your organization are some of the best reasons to look seriously at adopting social collaboration tools. We've seen this in our work when such tools allowed teams to connect and overcome natural barriers to get work done.

I heard someone say recently, if you are not engaging them at least don't do things to disengage them! Most work systems do just that for many workers. Allowing and learning Social Collaboration Tool use is an excelleng step in the right direction.

Plantronics has a shiny new headquarters in Santa Cruz, Calif., but most employees probably won’t spend too much time there.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

This is a great example of redesigning of an organization as a whole system. Often the thinking about work only includes process or a specific feature. Here Plantronics has carried the "theme" into the architecture. The office space is desinged to reflect a workforce that works somewhere other than the physical office.

There are only desks for 60-70% off the staff. Video screens around the office allow remote staff members to participate in meetings at anytime...even with informal or spontaneous gatherings.

In the past, this kind of work design was often an innovative approach to work life balance. Now, it is aimed squarely at a new generation worker who expects instant access and connection to others.

To me, the best organization design is built from the inside out... from work design to organization design. This is a great start.

Innovation is essential for the success of an organisation as an organisation that wants to be a market leader in today chaotic and complex business world must be receptive to new ideas and continue to be innovative.

Fiscal pressures prompt governments to redesign service delivery modelsCanada NewsWire (press release)Across a broad portfolio - from child welfare and income security to disability services and youth development - the need to adopt a business-like,...

Its also big news today for Hospitals. However, Dr Cosgrove implies...it is not on the radar of many. However he points out the evolution that is taking place. More specializations - we knew that. More consolidations - we knew that too. However, most may not be so familiar with the fact that as many as 25% of hospitals are in the red.

Or they may not be so familiar with the massive increase in complexity in two big areas:

Knowledge Complexity: Dr Cosgrove points out that the amount of knowledge needed requires support from systems and other professionals. Stand alone physicians are looking for alternatives

Back Office Complexity. This is not just a function of new healthcare legislation.The number of office staff in most practices has exploded over the past two decades reflecting the challenge of keeping up with complexity. Dr. Cosgrove points to this as one of the reasons for the growth of large mega-systems.

Other industries who have gone through similar transitions and the ones most successful are those who:

Do a great job at integrating cultures and/or

Master organization design to remake hospitals into result based services supported by highly collaborative work systems.

The skill of focus is the first "integrating cultures". However, to really win the game design of collaborative service systems will need tobe in the skill set of any successful healthcare leader.

Re-design is happening but too slowly to offset the costs of getting it wrong.

According to a global survey of marketing professionals by Teradata, 74 percent of the respondents said that marketing and IT are not strategic partners in their companies. That's bad news for IT in any case, but IT pros might ...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Today's organization has more potential than ever to truly be customer focused. Natural organization silos must be removed and structures redrawn to take advantage of the immense information available to improve the relationship. A McKinsey report quoted in the article points out that 70% of customers buy based on how they are treated. Achieving that is much easier when the builders and maintainers of the information system are aligned with marketing to turn data into valuable information.

How well are your IT and Marketing professionals collaborating?

Does this collaboration generate a fount of valuable data based information?

If not you should consider actions (including an organization redesign) to unlock the information you are missing each day.

Your competitor may just be the 1 out of 4 who have already addressed this head on... where does that leave you?

There is a good design principle at play here - design your organization for focus. Some of the investment community had become concerned about this great organizations ability to focus. The recent CEO was serving on more than 20 corporate boards. Bill Akman - leader of a hedge fund with more than 30 million shares of P&G - estimated that 25% of the former CEO's time was spent attending board meetings. Not good for focus.

Here the organization has subdivided from two groups into four. Make no mistake we are in a period where a type of de-centralization is taking place. When performance and real organic growth are important organizations need to create focus that gives them the ability to make decisions faster...focused decision.

As medical entities are scrambling for structures and alignments for survival positions, some interesting forms are emerging. However, structure will always depend upon behavior...and a healthy dose of trust. Cooperative models have been around for years with many good examples. These usually exist and succeed when there is mutual benefit, balanced power and mutual respect. Great leaders in these organizations will need to manage from a value of collaborative intent. Overcoming natural self interests for the sake of collaboration benefits will not be easy.

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - As the debt crisis raged across the euro zone last year, Madrid-native Laura Tapias and her partner found themselves out of work. With nearly one in four Spaniards unemployed, (Page 2 of 2)...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Global production and jobs are shifting

While much of the world was experiencing near recession, Chile was booming. The country's unemeployment rate has fallen to levels near full employment. One consequence has been double digit growth (near 25% annually) in immigration.

Professionals from abroad - especially Spain where the unemployment rate is 25% - are in great demand.

From the article

Companies are asking for more work permits, so they can recruit people from abroad," said Jonas Prising, president of global staffing services company ManpowerGroup .

"Countries like Australia, Canada, Singapore, Panama in some cases, they understand that they don't have enough of a labor pool. They also understad understand that if you have enough skilled labor, companies will invest in your country, you can continue to grow," he added.

However, one consequence is the lack of infrastructure - especially access to education. Chile is making investments but there are many to be made.

Keep an eye of Chile to see if they manage to invest well and deal with the strains of growth.

Product Design & DevelopmentToyota, BMW Working on New Battery TechnologyProduct Design & DevelopmentAn agreement to work on technologies together was signed in June last year.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

What limits do you put on your organization design? Accomplishing strategic objectives could mean that you expand your organization into the world of collaborating with your competitor - as in the case of Toyota and BMW. In their case, choosing collaboration over competition makes sense. The need to create new advances in energy storage is driving companies to make strategic collaborative arrangements.

What to Consider When Designing Your OrganizationInternet EvolutionAs the alignment with the corporation decreases, IT organizations aligned with individual business units are created with independent and redundant layers of management.

Billy R Bennett's insight:

Mansur Habib reminds us of the a great philosophy in smart, elegant design - The Sweet Spot. In most designs there are tradeoffs. Unfortunately, we often skew designs to extremes - as in the case of IT centralization vs. decentralization. Too much either way and you put something at risk... fail to push the design to the appropriate edge and you miss potential benefits.

Remember in design work there is no rule of one form of organization being better than another... it depends on many factors. Good organization design considers the whole system and looks for the Sweet Spot.

In these posts, I have highlighted the typical organization chart and how we must change to more of a Venn diagram type of structure to meet the ever-changing world. The best model that I have found to do this is the Lean ...

ForbesYour Content Is Giving You A People ProblemForbesNot accounting for content unfortunately results in surprise due to a naiveté of the accountability needed and organizational change that will inevitably occur due to post-launch ongoing...

Billy R Bennett's insight:

A personal lesson of the past year... If you do not engage your entire organization in creating portable knowledge content you will pay a very big price at a time when you can least afford it.

Just because you don't see yourself as a media company does not mean you are not a media company. Content will be the buzzword, fad and miracle cure for 2013... And if that's where it stays with you, you will lose business to those that understand that the new world of work is about creating portable knowledge content.

How are you approaching organization design? How much of org design is about org charts. It is about moving boxes and changing layers. How boring. And how wrong.

I hope you use Eugene's article you make you think about more than a dashboard. I think Eugene would be disappointed if you did. While Eugene's article is about visual design for us all as we engage with the healthcare system... it is also about the system. Therefore it is also about the design of the organization within the system.

The problem with most organization design processes is they often focus only on positions, boxes and layers. This is often seperate from thinking of how the customer of the system, and the people connecting with the system should experience the system. In this case how should patients and professionals experience the #bigdata information in healthcare?

Use Tools to Spark Imagination

The dashboard tool is just that a tool. However, it also opens up a 3 dimensional view of what the healthcare experience should be --could be like. It allows dreaming.

I've participated in organization design processes where something less cool than this sparked a vision of systems working in a different way. I will never forget the sugar cubes... or the beer glasses... or the single piece of data that were all used to redesign organization systems and therefore the structure and how people worked.

If you are going to create organization designs that last and produce exceptional results - then you must re-think systems...you must re-think the experience...you must re-think results.

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